Epic Historial Collection (22 page)

The atmosphere struck him like a blow. The air was hot and heavy with the smell of cooking fish, and there was a raucous din of clattering pans and shouted orders. Three cooks, all red with heat and hurry, were preparing the dinner with the aid of six or seven young kitchen hands. There were two vast fireplaces, one at either end of the room, both blazing fiercely, and at each fireplace twenty or more fish were cooking on a spit turned by a perspiring boy. The smell of the fish made Philip's mouth water. Whole carrots were being boiled in great iron pots of water which hung over the flames. Two young men stood at a chopping block, cutting yard-long loaves of white bread into thick slices to be used as trenchers—edible plates. Overseeing the apparent chaos was one monk: Brother Milius, the kitchener, a man of about Philip's age. He sat on a high stool, watching the frenetic activity all about him with an unperturbed smile, as if everything were orderly and perfectly organized—which it probably was to his experienced eye. He smiled at Philip and said: “Thank you for the cheese.”

“Ah, yes.” Philip had forgotten about that, so much had happened since he arrived. “It's made of milk from the morning milking only—you'll find it tastes subtly different.”

“My mouth is watering already. But you look glum. Is something wrong?”

“It's nothing. I had harsh words with Andrew.” Philip made a deprecatory gesture, as if to wave Andrew away. “May I take a hot stone from your fire?”

“Of course.”

There were always several stones in the kitchen fires, ready to be taken out and used for rapid heating of small amounts of water or soup. Philip explained: “Brother Paul, on the bridge, has a chilblain, and Remigius won't give him a fire.” He picked up a pair of long-handled tongs and removed a hot stone from the hearth.

Milius opened a cupboard and took out a piece of old leather that had once been some kind of apron. “Here—wrap it in this.”

“Thanks.” Philip put the hot stone in the middle of the leather and picked up the corners gingerly.

“Be quick,” Milius said. “Dinner's ready.”

Philip left the kitchen with a wave. He crossed the kitchen courtyard and headed for the gate. To his left, just inside the west wall, was the mill. A channel had been dug, upstream of the priory, many years ago, to bring water from the river to the millpond. After driving the mill wheel the water ran by an underground channel to the brewery, the kitchen, the fountain in the cloisters where the monks washed their hands before meals, and finally the latrine next to the dormitory, after which it turned south and rejoined the river. One of the early priors had been an intelligent planner.

There was a pile of dirty straw outside the stable, Philip noted: the hands were following his orders and mucking out the stalls. He went out through the gate and walked through the village toward the bridge.

Was it presumptuous of me to reprove young William Beauvis? he asked himself as he passed among the shacks. He thought not, on reflection. In fact it would have been wrong to
ignore
such a disruption during the service.

He reached the bridge and put his head inside Paul's little shelter. “Warm your feet on this,” he said, handing over the hot stone wrapped in leather. “When it cools a bit, take the leather off and put your feet directly on the stone. It should last until nightfall.”

Brother Paul was pathetically grateful. He slipped off his sandals and put his feet on the bundle immediately. “I can feel the pain easing already,” he said.

“If you put the stone back in the kitchen fire tonight it will be hot again by morning,” Philip said.

“Brother Milius won't mind?” Paul said nervously.

“I guarantee it.”

“You're very good to me, Brother Philip.”

“It's nothing.” Philip left before Paul's thanks became embarrassing. It was only a hot stone.

He returned to the priory. He went into the cloisters and washed his hands in the stone basin in the south walk, then entered the refectory. One of the monks was reading aloud at a lectern. Dinner was supposed to be taken in silence, apart from the reading, but the noise of forty-odd monks eating amounted to a constant undertone, and there was also a good deal of whispering despite the rule. Philip slipped into an empty place at one of the long tables. The monk next to him was eating with enormous relish. He caught Philip's eye and murmured: “Fresh fish today.”

Philip nodded. He had seen it in the kitchen. His stomach rumbled.

The monk said: “We hear you have fresh fish every day at your cell in the forest.” There was envy in his voice.

Philip shook his head. “Every other day we have poultry,” he whispered.

The monk looked even more envious. “Salt fish here, six times a week.”

A servant placed a thick bread trencher in front of Philip, then put on it a fish fragrant with Brother Milius's herbs. Philip's mouth watered. He was about to attack the fish with his eating knife when a monk at the far end of the table stood up and pointed at him. It was the circuitor, the monk responsible for discipline. Philip thought: What now?

The circuitor broke the rule of silence, as was his right. “Brother Philip!”

The other monks stopped eating and the room went quiet.

Philip paused with his knife over the fish and looked up expectantly.

The circuitor said: “The rule is, no dinner for latecomers.”

Philip sighed. It seemed he could do nothing right today. He put away his knife, handed the trencher and the fish back to the servant, and bowed his head to listen to the reading.

 

During the rest period after dinner Philip went to the storeroom beneath the kitchen to talk to Cuthbert Whitehead, the cellarer. The storeroom was a big, dark cavern with short thick pillars and tiny windows. The air was dry and full of the scents of the stores: hops and honey, old apples and dried herbs, cheese and vinegar. Brother Cuthbert was usually to be found here, for his job did not leave him much time for services, which suited his inclination: he was a clever, down-to-earth fellow with little interest in the spiritual life. The cellarer was the material counterpart of the sacrist: Cuthbert had to provide for all the monks' practical needs, gathering in the produce of the monastery's farms and granges and going to market to buy what the monks and their employees could not provide themselves. The job required careful forethought and calculation. Cuthbert did not do it alone: Milius the kitchener was responsible for the preparation of the meals, and there was a chamberlain who took care of the monks' clothing. These two worked under Cuthbert's orders, and there were three more officials who were nominally under his control but had a degree of independence: the guest-master; the infirmarer, who looked after old and sick monks in a separate building; and the almoner. Even with people working under him, Cuthbert had a formidable task; yet he kept it all in his head, saying it was a shame to waste parchment and ink. Philip suspected that Cuthbert had never learned to read and write very well. Cuthbert's hair had been white since he was young, hence the surname Whitehead, but he was now past sixty, and the only hair he had left grew in thick white tufts from his ears and nostrils, as if to compensate for his baldness. As Philip had been a cellarer himself at his first monastery, he understood Cuthbert's problems and sympathized with his grouches. Consequently Cuthbert was fond of Philip. Now, knowing that Philip had missed his dinner, Cuthbert picked out half a dozen pears from a barrel. They were somewhat shriveled, but tasty, and Philip ate them gratefully while Cuthbert grumbled about the monastery's finances.

“I can't understand how the priory can be in debt,” Philip said through a mouthful of fruit.

“It shouldn't be,” Cuthbert said. “It owns more land, and collects tithes from more parish churches, than ever before.”

“So why aren't we rich?”

“You know the system we have here—the monastery's property is mostly divided up among the obedientaries. The sacrist has his lands, I have mine, and there are smaller endowments for the novice-master, the guest-master, the infirmarer and the almoner. The rest belongs to the prior. Each uses the income from his property to fulfill his obligations.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Well, all this property should be taken care of. For example, suppose we have some land, and we let it for a cash rent. We shouldn't just give it to the highest bidder and collect the money. We ought to take care to find a good tenant, and supervise him to make sure he farms well; otherwise the pastures become water-logged, the soil is exhausted, and the tenant is unable to pay the rent so he gives the land back to us in poor condition. Or take a grange, farmed by our employees and managed by monks: if nobody visits the grange except to take away its produce, the monks become slothful and depraved, the employees steal the crops, and the grange produces less and less as the years go by. Even a church needs to be looked after. We shouldn't just take the tithes. We should put in a good priest who knows the Latin and leads a holy life. Otherwise the people descend into ungodliness, marrying and giving birth and dying without the blessing of the Church, and cheating on their tithes.”

“The obedientaries should manage their property carefully,” Philip said as he finished the last pear.

Cuthbert drew a cup of wine from a barrel. “They should, but they have other things on their minds. Anyway, what does the novice-master know about farming? Why should the infirmarer be a capable estate manager? Of course, a strong prior will force them to husband their resources, to some extent. But we've had a weak prior for thirteen years, and now we have no money to repair the cathedral church, and we eat salt fish six days a week, and the school is almost empty of novices, and no one comes to the guesthouse.”

Philip sipped his wine in gloomy silence. He found it difficult to think coolly about such appalling dissipation of God's assets. He wanted to get hold of whoever was responsible and shake him until he saw sense. But in this case the person responsible was lying in a coffin behind the altar. There, at least, was a glimmer of hope. “Soon we'll have a new prior,” Philip said. “He ought to put things right.”

Cuthbert shot him a peculiar look. “Remigius? Put things right?”

Philip was not sure what Cuthbert meant. “Remigius isn't going to be the new prior, is he?”

“It's likely.”

Philip was dismayed. “But he's no better than Prior James! Why would the brothers vote for him?”

“Well, they're suspicious of strangers, so they won't vote for anyone they don't know. That means it has to be one of us. And Remigius is the sub-prior, the most senior monk here.”

“But there's no rule that says we have to choose the most senior monk,” Philip protested. “It could be another one of the obedientaries. It could be you.”

Cuthbert nodded. “I've already been asked. I refused.”

“But why?”

“I'm getting old, Philip. The job I have now would defeat me, except that I'm so used to it I can do it automatically. Any more responsibility would be too much. I certainly haven't got the energy to take a slack monastery and reform it. In the end I'd be no better than Remigius.”

Philip still could not believe it. “There are others—the sacrist, the circuitor, the novice-master…”

“The novice-master is old and more tired than I am. The guest-master is a glutton and a drunkard. And the sacrist and the circuitor are pledged to vote for Remigius. Why? I don't know, but I'll guess. I'd say Remigius has promised to promote the sacrist to sub-prior and make the circuitor the sacrist, as a reward for their support.”

Philip slumped back on the sacks of flour that formed his seat. “You're telling me that Remigius already has the election sewn up.”

Cuthbert did not reply immediately. He stood up and went to the other side of the storeroom, where he had arranged in line a wooden bath full of live eels, a bucket of clean water, and a barrel one-third full of brine. “Help me with this,” he said. He took out a knife. He selected an eel from the bath, banged its head on the stone floor, then gutted it with the knife. He handed the fish, still feebly wriggling, to Philip. “Wash it in the bucket, then drop it in the barrel,” he said. “These will deaden our appetites during Lent.”

Philip rinsed the half-dead eel as carefully as he could in the bucket, then tossed it into the salt water.

Cuthbert gutted another eel and said: “There is one other possibility: a candidate who would be a good reforming prior and whose rank, although below that of the sub-prior, is the same as that of the sacrist or the cellarer.”

Philip plunged the eel into the bucket. “Who?”

“You.”

“Me!” Philip was so surprised he dropped the eel on the floor. He did, technically, rank as an obedientary of the priory, but he never thought of himself as being equal to the sacrist and the others because they were all so much older than he. “I'm too young—”

“Think about it,” Cuthbert said. “You've spent your whole life in monasteries. You were a cellarer at the age of twenty-one. You've been prior of a small place for four or five years—and you've reformed it. It's clear to everyone that the hand of God is on you.”